Echo Chambers or Opinion Crossroads? Comparative Analysis of Structure and Influencers in Twitter-based discussions on inter-ethnic Conflicts in the USA, Germany, France, and Russia

In the recent decades, inter-ethnic conflicts have globalized, though the national dimension of communication on them remains highly relevant. Even despite the capacity of Twitter to represent sides of inter-group conflicts is still a matter of academic discussion, we argue that, in cases of inter-ethnic conflicts, Twitter data provide relevant pictures of the discussion surrounding them. I.a., Twitter data allow for judging whether the discussion encapsulates within ‘echo chambers’ or allows for ‘opinion crossroads’. Answering how and why the Twitter discussion mirrors the societal cleavages and sides of the conflict may provide understanding on access of various groups to the platform, as well as on which public actors (political actors, media, diaspora, NGOs etc.) actively form the discourse upon the conflict. In comparative perspective, this allows for assessing the role of various actors in constructing the public discussion in social media in the conflictual and ‘calm’ (pre-/post-conflictual) periods of time. The study analyses four conflicts salient in media agendas of Germany, France, the USA and Russia, as well as four ‘calm’ periods. The cases under scrutiny are, respectively, the PEGIDA outburst, the attack to Charlie Hebdo, the Ferguson riots, and the Biryulyovo bashings. These conflicts are united by their inter-ethnic / inter-racial nature, violent character, and polarization and radicalization of national public spheres towards the ‘minorities’ involved, be it African Americans in the US or immigrant communities in Germany, France and Russia. Despite the cases are different, we argue that they are comparable in terms of analysis of media representation of the conflict sides, as well as in terms of finding the discursive leaders and outsiders. To see whether the user activity in conflict differs from that in calm periods, four comparable periods are analyzed as well for each of the four countries. The methodology of the study is mixed – we use vocabulary-based automated web crawling, coding of tweet samples, statistical analysis, and interpretative reading of tweet threads to reconstruct the societal cleavages that lay behind the discussion in each case. The overall collection of tweets includes over 60,000 units; the overall coded sample is over 2,000 tweets (at least 500 tweets per each of the eight periods studied). Preliminary results suggest that national Twitter segments show varying potential for ‘crossroads’ formation. The biggest ‘crossroads’ potential is seen in the US Twitter, while German and French segments show several ‘echo chambers’ within the same vocabulary, and the Russian Twitter is a united ‘filter bubble’ that ‘filters out’ the migrant community. But there are also similarities, especially in mediatization patterns: conflictual periods seem to be dominated by media on Twitter, while in calm periods the discourse is actively formed by ‘polar’ public actors – e.g. nationalist accounts in Russian Twitter or pro-migrant NGOs and nationalist accounts in German-language Twitter.